For about a week now I've been evaluating the
Premium Membership offered by SEOmoz. I've already concluded that without a doubt the fee (at least the monthly one) is well worth the content that comes with the membership. However, up until a couple of days ago I had yet to look at the three search engine optimization (
SEO) guides available for download.
The first guide I looked at is titled
The Professional’s Guide to Link Building. I read it first because it’s a topic I'm interested in and one in which I know I can improve my skills. True to the title, this link building guide is one of the best I've seen. Some of the techniques I was already familiar with, but even so reading about all of them in a single document prompted many ideas which I jotted down for future efforts. Other tips were completely new to me and they made the guide all the more valuable to me. I give the Professional’s Guide to Link Building a thumbs up and recommend it for intermediate level SEOs and link builders.
Next up was
The Professional’s Keyword Research Guide. Again, this is an area of interest which should make sense since keyword research is a critical component of all
SEO efforts. However, my expectation was that there wouldn't be a whole lot of new material here as I consider my keyword research skills to be pretty good. My expectations were met with the guide offering the occasional tidbit of new information, but for the most part what I got out of it is validation of my current techniques. Validation is important not because it necessarily makes you better at what you do, but because it makes you more confident about how you do it. Confidence can win clients.
The final document was
The Illustrated Guide to Building a Search-Friendly Website. Of the three guides this one is the most basic. SEOs that might find it helpful are those that haven't applied
SEO before a site has been launched. In such cases it’s important to be aware of site architecture issues and how best to organize content to maximize rankings. There are tactics you can employ before a site launches that are near impossible (because of political, resource, or technical constraints) once a site is live and this guide identifies many of them. While I didn't learn anything new from this guide, I do think it is still well-written and potentially useful to web designers, web developers, and beginner SEOs.
So there you have it. A quick look at the premium membership guides. I understand there’s a fourth in the works. If it’s like the first three and as advanced as the link building guide, I'm going to be one happy
SEO!